CRMEP is an independent educational association based in London. We organize events, publications and study groups. We provide open access to a wide range of writing and lectures in post-Kantian philosophy and critical theory, including Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and the critique of the European tradition. Support the CRMEP
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Join us to celebrate the publication of CRMEP Books Volume 8: Peter Osborne and Howard Caygill, eds, Promise & Perdition in the Thought of Gillian Rose. Also launching two books on Robert Walser: Simon Wortham, Robert Walser and the Politics of Neglect – with an Introduction by CRMEP's Howard Caygill (Palgrave Macmillan) and Simon Wortham, Robert Walser: Criticism, Creativity, Correspondence (UCL Press).
Over the past decade, the concept of fascism has returned with a vengeance in attempts to understand the planetary shift to the far-right. As several commentators have rightly indicated, the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s is considerably different from the fascism that appears to be shaping the politics of the contemporary global order. The latter has been understood along two distinct axes. The first holds that it is a species of authoritarian populism in which movements purporting to embody or personify the will of the “people” are driven to transgress every moral, epistemic and aesthetic limit in manifesting sovereign power. The second mainatins that contemporary fascism is a form of what has been referred to as “technofascism,” which has been given politico-philosophical shape by “Dark Enlightenment” thinkers such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin who articulate starkly anti-democratic positions. While the first form could be said to undermine liberal democracy from within by pushing it in an increasingly “illiberal” direction, the second form brazenly attacks the very idea of democracy from without, by explicitly stating its incompatibility with capitalist social relations. In this lecture, I will pose the question as to which explanation best grasps the contemporary authoritarian turn and how can it be opposed.
The essays collected in this eighth volume from CRMEP Books derive from a conference on the thought of the British sociologist and philosopher Gillian Rose, held at Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury, London, 18–19 June 2025. Interest in Rose’s wide-ranging body of critical work in the sociology and philosophy of modernity has grown significantly since her early death in 1995. In the wake of the publication of a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Rose’s Love’s Work (2024), along with some of her undergraduate lectures on critical theory from the University of Sussex at the end of the 1970s (Marxist Modernism, Verso, 2024), this thirty-year anniversary event set out to explore the play of promise and perdition – from which Love’s Work itself departed – across the full span of her writings.
A talk delivered at Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent's Street, London W1
This is a recording of a lecture given at Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, on 20 November 2025: ‘The Woman in the Rorschach Dress: Foucault at Münsterlingen'
This is a recording of a lecture given at Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, on 6 November 2025: ‘Process Metaphysics and “Promiscuous Realism”: Reflections on John Dupré's Philosophy of Biology’
